Chapter 45

"Carl," it was the Judge. "We have a bit of new news. It seems the stock of yours is about to

split, five for two, because of favorable conditions made possible by your cash infusion and the quick progress toward completion and delivery. Since you own all preferred stock, and the terms of your temporary stock swap, you get paid first.

"This is where it gets a bit complicated," and he explained the intricacies of extraordinary stock manipulations, the inner workings of the SEC, and the ways in which our lawyers were fire walling the transaction. In the end, I understood about fourteen percent of it, if that.

The gist of the deal remained the same. The stock buy-back would occur automatically, by computer, in the dead of night, but the government, in the form of the SEC and the FBI, would sweep in, block settlement, and sweep the accounts clean. This would leave Hussein and company financially naked, sought by multiple federal agencies on a variety of charges, and I would be 'accidentally' identified as the offended party who lost everything in the deal. Once word trickled up to the sheiks and their Imams, violence would break out in all quarters, and bodies would begin to stack up by the cord.

The Judge was counting on it.

Colleen, Jim, Winnie, and I sat up all night watching the transaction take place on a complicated computer program set up for us by a man from the Judge's office. Our original basket of preferred shares had split and become roughly two and a half times as many, at seventy-eight dollars a share, meaning our repayment came to over four-billion, six-hundred and eighty million dollars.

Our loan repayment owed to the Caymans Bank, was paid out of Hussein's side of the deal, and no brokerage fees, or any other expenses were posted against the sale. Without tax exposure, my trust became over four billion dollars richer. That was stupid money, and I had no idea how to measure that against anything that I had ever seen, heard about, learned, or read, in my entire life.

Jim and I looked at each other when the final tally posted to my accounts. He smiled and asked, "What in the world are you going to do with nearly ten billion dollars?"

That was the question of the hour.

Beth Ann, Rebecca, and Colleen had helped me identify a number of needy persons, communities, churches, medical clinics for disadvantaged persons, worthy charities, and some solid research foundations that sought cures for everything from cancer to childhood diabetes.

Colleen hired two extra, full time attorneys just to vet potential targets for our donations, and I sent two million dollars to Doctor Abrams, in Sweden, for the work they were doing on Jennifer's condition and other sicknesses that target children.

Rebecca suggested we endow a medical school to early identify appropriate American students that would otherwise be passed over for placement in medical school. They would tutor, mentor, and guide them through to their M.D. We all liked that, and she took it on as her personal mission.

Beth Ann asked me what I thought about helping Brian's school, and I called John Amundsen, at Tail Wheels, Etc., and with his guidance bought a small fleet of Cessna one-seventy-twos, properly equipped to train high school aged pilots. We also funded a maintenance budget, complete with a training center for student aircraft mechanics, at the airport in Lakeland.

We met with Kermit Weeks, owner of the former Fantasy of Flight, vintage aircraft attraction near Brian's school, and funded a cross training program to train pilots for the old airplanes and mechanics to keep them functional. We wanted future generations could experience the history of flight, and those mechanics would learn how to maintain a huge piece of aviation's past, which was a double bonus. We asked Kermit to try and identify youngsters who might otherwise have a limited ability for educational opportunities, and steer them to us so we could take care of their aviation education.

Beth Ann accepted responsibility as liaison with Brian's school and Fantasy of Flight. Both were ecstatic. The cross training potential was huge, and we agreed to fund expansion of the program to include young pilots, and mechanics who wished to expand their knowledge and experience.

By the time Hussein and Massoud were dead, along with hundreds and hundreds of their partners and enemies, we were hard at work searching for an island that we could purchase that was an independent nation. We wanted to try and develop a third world economy into a balanced, local agriculture and light manufacturing economic engine, capable of substantially improving the standard of living, educational opportunities, and medical care to meet the needs of all citizens.

It sounded like a pipe dream, but Jim and I scoured the island chains for just the right place to buy, and hoped to have one identified and purchased by winter.

We even consulted with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to look for opportunities and potential partnerships, and especially to avoid treading on each other's' projects. The synergies turned out to be fantastic.

Throughout the summer and fall, I waited for the baseball bug to bite me, but apparently the need to build a baseball operation in Branson went away when I transitioned from David back to Carl. I found myself thinking about my teammates and all those whose lives intertwined with me during the last trip through, but the desire to jump back in the baseball water never materialized.

Building my own independent country was a much bigger and far more worthwhile endeavor.

The Judge visited us as we winnowed potential islands down to three and jumped feet first into our game, proclaiming, "Carl, that's easy. We'll get a price on Nauru, which is a small island in Micronesia, and could be purchased, for a veritable song. Give me a little time, and we'll have a deal to present to you. The only condition is we will want you to open a bank on the island and let us park money there for future missions. We will need to ensure that it doesn't attract the wrong kind of attention by becoming an illegal tax avoidance scam, rather it should be a primo investment bank, visible and highly competent. Like hiding something in plain sight.

"Give me a few days, or a week and let's see what's what and we'll talk." He seemed so confident that I thought it was Ok to let him help.

Nauru is technically the Republic of Nauru and formerly known as Pleasant Island. It is an island country in Micronesia in the South Pacific. Nauru is located forty-two miles south of the equator, and is about three and half miles in size, east and west, by roughly six miles north and south. Its nearest neighbor is Banaba Island in Kiribati, one-hundred eighty-six miles east. With just under ten-thousand residents in a twenty-one-square-mile area, Nauru is the smallest state in the South Pacific and second smallest state by population in the world, behind only Vatican City.